Lorelai Gilmore

I don’t know if there is any sense to watching same old episodes from Gilmore Girls over and over again, every day in fact. I do it when I have pressing deadlines to meet, when I am sick, when I am low, when I need inspiration, when I feel that I want to leave the planet and interestingly, even when I am really happy. Lorelai Gilmore takes me back to the show again and again. And this has very little to do with the color of her eyes and her cute tops.

I want to be this woman. This incredibly independent, sensitive yet gutsy, committed not to fall back into the comfortable life that her parents promise and striving hard to make the most of wherever it is that life has got her to -kind of woman.

I didn’t like watching her when she was miserable. Like when Luke kept her away from a part of his life and she went nuts. But that’s only because she reminded me that she is human after all. She may have the bluest eyes, a humongous capacity to consume coffee, the ability to come up with a dozen comebacks even when you are trying to figure out the first one, the strength to give her daughter the space and the right to make her own mistakes, the courage to stand up to her parents even when they are at their most vulnerable point. She can be all of these and still be believable to me.

I was 16 when I first watched it. I don’t remember much of what I watched back then but when I finally learned how to download stuff off the internet, which was when I was 20, Gilmore Girls was the first thing I downloaded. Watching Lorelai Gilmore on screen after 4 years brought me a sense of direction. I have always taken dumb things like these seriously; movies, characters, their relationships, their desires and tragedies.

What Gilmore Girls provides me with apart from direction is some kind of choice to be either like Lorelai or Rory (Lorelai’s daughter) or both. Rory’s relationship with academia always appealed to me. Lorelai’s relationship with herself and how she always knows what she wants thrilled me to bits. So there are days when I choose to be Rory and days when I whine about why I am not like Lorelai Gilmore.

It’s the crazy things that the woman does that crack me up and also get me to seriously think. Like when Rory was frantically looking for her bracelet and Lorelai is helping her. She finds her grandmother’s pen under the sofa. But Lorelai insists on letting the pen lie there simply because it ‘makes life interesting’.

Lorelai’s now there- now gone relationship with her mother is also something that I relate to, at a very beautiful level. She tries half heartedly to repair this ugliness but as she puts it, when she talks, all her mother hears is ‘blah blah blah, ginger’.

I have fallen awfully behind sometimes with the show’s pace and have felt miserable when I couldn’t catch the pop culture references that both Lorelai and Rory throw at each other. Much of my watching this show therefore was constantly interrupted by pausing and then googling to find out who some singer is or what the word ‘schnickelfritz’ means and other weird things like that.

Needless to say I did learn a great deal from the show. Things I’ve obviously forgotten now but after a point the whole pausing and googling thing became really interesting and has only made me more curious.

The show also has characters that will become your mortal enemies simply because they are that irritating. Taylor, the town mayor for instance is a conventional man whose interests in developing the town don’t just stop at its infrastructure. He is also bothered by the people and their lifestyles and the kinds of songs that the town troubadour sings and the shapes and sizes of fruits that grow in the town.

Along with him there are other characters who have challenged my abilities as a watcher. There was a time when I had no patience to deal with Taylor and the Town Troubadour’s songs so I would just forward them. It took me 5 years of watching and watching again to appreciate the carnivalesque setting that is ‘Star’s hollow’ (fictional town near Connecticut, U.S where the show is based)

I’m not sure if I like this show a lot because it has helped me discover myself. Not because I discover myself every evening and then forget it in 2 hours. But because everytime something changes in my life and I get all nervous, ‘Gilmore girls’ does not soothe me. It makes me look at the characters differently, which brings me to look at things in a whole new perspective. There was a time when I simply could not understand Rory’s feelings for Jess but now I do.

The only complaint I have about this show is that it makes a very vague attempt at bringing Lorelai’s past to the audience. There has only been one episode and that too in bits of 2 min footage on Lorelai’s life before she got pregnant and right after she does. It left me with more questions than anything else. How did Lorelai finally leave her parents’ for instance?

Maybe it’s good that some part of this woman’s adolescence still remains a mystery. Maybe that’s also why I keep going back to the show. To learn more about Lorelai Gilmore.